People hold candles as they gather for an anti-bullying rally. (AP Photo/Mel Evans)

(Newser)
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Police in Cincinnati are investigating the heartbreaking circumstances leading up to the suicide of an 8-year-old boy in January. Police say security camera footage from a restroom in Carson Elementary School shows a fellow student knocking the boy to the floor, leaving him unconscious. For another five minutes, other students "step over, point, mock, nudge, kick, etc." the boy before an assistant principal rushes in, homicide detective Eric Karaguleff says in a report to the school, the Cincinnati Enquirer reports. The boy, identified by the Enquirer as Gabriel Taye, hanged himself in his bedroom two days after the Jan. 24 assault, per FOX19. The school system agreed Thursday to release the video after blurring the children's faces.

Lawyer Jennifer Branch, hired by the boy's mother to find out what really happened to her son, says the school told the mother he had fainted. She says the boy vomited the evening of the assault. His mother took him to the hospital, where she was told he'd probably come down with the stomach flu. He didn't go to school the next day and hanged himself after coming home from school on Jan. 26. Branch says the mother would have taken the boy to the hospital immediately and would not have let him return to Carson if she'd known he had been assaulted and was unconscious on the bathroom floor for so long. "Mom is really heartbroken that she didn't know what she needed to know to protect her son," she says. (There's a "disturbingly common" problem in US schools.)

Welcome to the wonderful world of undisciplined entitlement. This is what the end result is: monsters without consciences or any sense of accountability for their fellows' well-being.

FRANK

May 12, 2017 3:01 PM CDT

What's really sickening is that the school tried to cover this up, telling his mom he had fainted. They claim they have no bullying problem. Didn't want to effect the principal's and staff's earnings. This school has been in academic emergency for years, but nothing ever changes. And Cincinnati School board spends over &18,000.00 per student.